By: Richard Whitmire
Published: 01-21-09
Back in 1997 I visited two Houston elementary schools Roosevelt and Benbrook located only a couple of miles apart in equally disadvantaged neighborhoods serving equally disadvantaged students. Roosevelt was hitting academic home runs while Benbrook lagged far behind.
Why the difference? My story attempted to answer that question but in hindsight the answer was less important than the fact that I was able to even pose the question. I went to Houston because Texas had a revolutionary school accountability system that tracked children by race and economic background thus allowing apples-to-apples comparisons of which schools were doing the best job with the kids they were handed.
I wasn’t alone in noticing the potential of accountability by the numbers. Then-Gov. George W. Bush who inherited that system noticed it as well inspiring him to make school reform the stuffing inside his “compassionate conservatism” theme in the 2000 presidential election. Surely you have not forgotten the “bigotry of low expectations.” Among soccer moms that bumped up Bush on the comfort-level meter just enough to neutralize the traditional 15-to-20-point advantage Democrats traditionally enjoy on education issues. The rest is history.
Cynics assumed the Republican school reform rhetoric would quickly evaporate but once in Washington Bush shocked House conservatives by promptly acting on his campaign pledge. (Then-Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Texas) once confessed to Rush Limbaugh his distaste for supporting Bush education reforms saying that abolishing the Department of Education was his true preference.)
Bush however didn’t need their support. Once he convinced key liberals such as Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Education Trust’s Kati Haycock that he believed education reform was the new frontier in the civil rights struggle a bipartisan effort then produced No Child Left Behind the education law signed on January 2002. NCLB was a mirror image of what I saw in Houston that day.
The law judges schools by the job they do for all children not just the easy-to-teach children. Suddenly hundreds of schools that had been hiding their failures to teach poor and minority students behind school averages were outed which was appropriate. That brand of school accountability known to education insiders as disaggregated data is not just George W. Bush’s education legacy; it’s the jewel of any domestic achievement. Over time I’m guessing it will trump any overseas accomplishments such as ramping up the AIDS fight in Africa.
That suggestion rankles the tens of thousands of fervent NCLB haters. Why? Because the law strips arts music and recess out of schools they say. (The law mandates no such thing.) Or because it reduces learning to teaching to the test. (Actually in states with good tests you want that to happen.) Many teachers contend the law strips the spontaneity and creativity from their profession. (That prompts me to recall our oldest daughter’s seventh-grade English teacher who decided to spend the year teaching her true love poetry rather than grammar.)
Finding genuine shortcomings in the law is not difficult. Political compromises in Congress allowed each state to set its own standards. States such as Mississippi which set breathtakingly low standards reported its kids were doing just dandy — until they were exposed by federal tests showing their kids scraped the nation’s bottom.
And ideologues in the Department of Education obsessively pushed what they embraced as the true-conservative parts of the law: school transfers and tutoring options for children in schools falling behind. That effort sputtered which may explain why education bureaucrats ignored their two most important missions — getting quality teachers into needy schools and solving the puzzle of what to do with the hundreds of schools that failed to make required progress year after year. Oops. Now we have all these troubled schools stacked up and nobody has a clue what to do with them.
Potentially these are reparable problems and they’re likely to get fixed by President-elect Barack Obama over the objections of the teachers unions which would like to see the law eviscerated. That won’t happen. The notion that Obama would gut a law exposing the maleducation of millions of black children is a fantasy. That’s why Democrats won’t break NCLB.
They’ll start by changing the name of the law ridding its association with the much-despised Bush. But the last laugh belongs to Bush because his Texas-style accountability will survive. And that’s what makes No Child Left Behind regardless of any name change Bush’s lasting legacy.
Richard Whitmire president of the National Education Writers Association blogs at www.whyboysfail.com.
